Pages

Saturday, June 09, 2012

Once again, Al Jazeera-English provides better coverage of something going on in the US than the US-based news media does. It’s ironic, considering how many US cable TV systems refuse to carry the channel. Actually, our pay TV operator doesn’t carry it, either, but I follow the channel on Twitter so I get links to their videos.

The video above is a report about the North Carolina preacher who called for concentration camps for GLBT people, along with another preacher who advocated violence against gay children. These vile and disgusting sermons were in a month that was overflowing with anti-gay hate speech.

In fact, May was so particularly awful for anti-gay hate-filled rhetoric from the USA’s “Christian” right that I planned a post of nothing but some of the most vile examples of their hate speech as a way to show what GLBT people have to deal with from the people who claim to be “victims” of some sort of “religious persecution”. It’s what I was referring to on my June 1 post when I wrote, “One such post, coming up in the next few days, will be the longest post on this blog by far.”

In the time since, I’ve been extremely busy with work and other things, but I kept working on that post when I could. I’ve since decided against publishing it, and here’s why: It repeated the rightwing's religious hatred and bigotry, and I didn’t want to pollute my blog with their venom.

That’s kind of been my response a lot lately: I’ll read about some anti-gay extremist, feel angry—and then I move on. I refuse to give them a place to live in my head or on this blog.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll give extremists a pass: I’ll still call out lies and defamatory nonsense, as I always have, but I’m just not going to waste my time or energy calling out the bigots every time—especially because if I did, I wouldn’t have time to post videos of trains crashing through snowbanks. And besides, in all seriousness, there are plenty of sites where such hate speech is well documented.

I think that confronting and standing up to evil is legitimate and important, but wallowing in the frequent examples of their rubbish is a waste of time. Sure, every so often some bigot will say or do something so heinous that I’ll simply have to respond, but most of the time I’d much rather talk about other things because there are more important subjects than the latest demented ravings of some religious nutjob.

So, this video basically takes the place of that very long post, and it’s also pretty much all I want to say about those particular losers.